Posts Tagged «lights»

What do you get if you combine Christmas, jury-rigged electronics, 22,000 lights, over a dozen inflatables, webcams, and custom server software running on a Linux server? Alek Komarnitsky’s controllable Christmas lights, of course! Every year, Alek — who is one of the world wide web’s most infamous OGs — lights up his house with 22,000 lights and over a dozen inflatables, and then lets strangers on the internet control them all via a gaudy website. Why? To raise money for research into celiac disease, which his kids were diagnosed with a few years ago.

Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland has begun the task of bringing high-speed, ubiquitous, LiFi technology to market. If Martin Dawson and Harald Haas have their way, any illuminated device — your TV, your bedside lamp, a road sign, a train or airport timetable — might soon double up as a wireless LiFi hotspot.

Starting March 5th, the San Francisco bay bridge will sport an absolutely mind-boggling light show. The bridge’s west span will feature LED lighting that is just under two miles wide and upwards of 500 feet high. For the next two years, over fifty million people will experience these LEDs flashing on the bridge. The craziest part is that the lighting pattern is algorithmically generated from weather, wildlife, and traffic, so the patterns never repeat.

A team of material scientists from Wake Forest University in North Carolina have developed plastic light bulbs that are shatter-proof, flicker-free, and seem to last forever. Furthermore, these plastic bulbs are about twice as efficient as fluorescent bulbs, on-par with LED bulbs, and — perhaps best of all — they produce a color and quality of light that ‘can match the solar spectrum perfectly.’

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